Twitter may have had really bad earnings last quarter, but its cofounder and chief executive Jack Dorsey continues to believe strongly in the company. Over the span of two days this week, he purchased 425,000 more shares at a price of nearly $ 7 million. His tweet on Tuesday summed up his feeling: “#LoveTwitter”
#LoveTwitter https://t.co/fELbw0ska7
— jack (@jack) February 14, 2017
Having Dorsey purchase more shares is certainly a symbolic gesture, one that is intended to show investors that there’s still potential in a company that has been assailed by critics who claim Twitter hasn’t done enough to tackle harassment, support Donald Trump’s continued use of the service, and more. Ever since coming back to run the company he cofounded, Dorsey has promised that things would be streamlined and established new priorities.
However, shares in Twitter have not really moved upwards under his leadership, even as his team has unveiled new products and features, and even promised to move faster to improve user safety. But its fourth quarter earnings results unveiled last week were certainly not kind to the company as it saw mediocre growth in users and a dip in advertising. “As previously stated, we expect advertising revenue growth to continue to lag that of audience growth in 2017,” the company said at the time. “Advertising revenue growth may be further impacted by escalating competition for digital ad spending and the re-evaluation of our revenue product feature portfolio, which could result in the de-emphasis of certain product features.”
What’s interesting about this week’s stock transaction is that these shares could have once been Dorsey’s. In 2015, he announced he would be giving 1/3 of his shares to Twitter’s employee equity pool with the intent of “reinvesting directly in our people.”
According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Dorsey now owns more than 30.5 million shares of common stock in Twitter.
